True enough. But the car will need to be aware of local traffic laws including speed limits and yield to/stop for emergency vehicles and official traffic stops, which means there is communication of some sort going into the car to make it aware of those things. It will also at a minimum have some GPS-like feature to make it aware of where it is, both for navigation and to index that reference of local laws;

Suppose someone figures out how to interfere with those things and inject their own malicious commun

You could easily do this with human drivers at the moment. Fake uniforms and a fake Homeland Security 'terrorism spot-check' will get everyone playing nice and quietly and too scared to do anything to resist.

...like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles...

How, exactly, would the police pull over an autonomous vehicle if there was no way to remotely access it? Therefore, hedwards was correct: there will be a way to crack the security and force the car to pull over, thus rendering autonomous vehicles vulnerable to the highwaymen. Hmmm...sounds like it could be the plot to a cool sci-fi story...

...like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles...

How, exactly, would the police pull over an autonomous vehicle if there was no way to remotely access it? Therefore, hedwards was correct: there will be a way to crack the security and force the car to pull over, thus rendering autonomous vehicles vulnerable to the highwaymen. Hmmm...sounds like it could be the plot to a cool sci-fi story...

I could swear I've seen that done...must have been in some low-budget cult movie, that didn't rip off a famous SF writer.

How, exactly, would the police pull over an autonomous vehicle if there was no way to remotely access it? Therefore, hedwards was correct: there will be a way to crack the security and force the car to pull over, thus rendering autonomous vehicles vulnerable to the highwaymen. Hmmm...sounds like it could be the plot to a cool sci-fi story...

At this time, OnStar can and does disable vehicles. They have commercials bragging about stolen vehicle recovery. Apparently it disables the throttle. After which the perp presumably guides it off to the side of the road. On th esurface, it seems like a cool thing, though I fear that there will be more and more calls to disable vehicles for more and more things. Deadbeat dad? You come out one day, and the car won't stop.

So it is a trivial matter to expand that to an autonomous vehicle. You will be able to be stopped for whatever they want to stop you for.

But this whole concept begs the question. If we are going to be sitting in vehicles that are guided by something else, if we are just going to be passengers, this is just about as inefficient a way as possible to achieve that little utopia. The line of cars is just approximating a bus. The only advantage is that you have a "last mile" effect of delivering you right to your driveway.

All in all, it seems a little like the olde tyme dream of everyone having a flying car or gyrocopter.

The line of cars is just approximating a bus. The only advantage is that you have a "last mile" effect of delivering you right to your driveway.

Except that unlike a bus, it's not occupied by anyone who's not with me (e.g., if they're drunk, I probably am too and don't mind), I can leave my possessions in it, it travels on my schedule (it goes just as many places at 3 AM as at noon), and, of course, it takes me directly to my destination.

Imagine if a 16-hour drive could be done as an overnight trip - you get off work on Friday for a week's vacation, you go home and put the suitcases in the car, eat a bit of dinner, and hit the road. You can be well rested and 1000 miles away by lunchtime the next day. All of a sudden, New Orleans is a weekend trip from DC.

Except that unlike a bus, it's not occupied by anyone who's not with me (e.g., if they're drunk, I probably am too and don't mind), I can leave my possessions in it, it travels on my schedule (it goes just as many places at 3 AM as at noon), and, of course, it takes me directly to my destination.

So the question is whether we'll put up with the inefficiency for that bit of convenience.

Imagine if a 16-hour drive could be done as an overnight trip - you get off work on Friday for a week's vacation, you go home and put the suitcases in the car, eat a bit of dinner, and hit the road. You can be well rested and 1000 miles away by lunchtime the next day. All of a sudden, New Orleans is a weekend trip from DC.

It's interesting that something that sounds like a good idea to some sounds awful to others. I've always found the trip at least as exciting as the destination, ans some times more so. The best thing about the interstate system - at least for me - is that now I can take the old and usually more scenic routes while others are white knuckling it with the crazies. I "discovered" it a few years back when to avoid some 30

It's not fear of stangers, it's distaste for loud, obnoxious strangers. Strangers that don't bathe. Strangers that use too much perfume. Strangers that smell like a combination of Vodka and vomit. Busses that are standing room only. Busses that stink because they're poorly maintained and smell like diesel fumes.

No thanks. I don't enjoy driving, but driving is a hell of a lot better than a bus. I don't have to stand outside in below freezing weather, or blistering heat for twenty minutes waiting to start my

The car would be able to respond to a police car and it's flashing lights the same way a human would. It's not hard to see and the police should follow a fairly similar procedure every time they want to pull some one over so you could recognise that the same way as you recognise another car's intent on the road (i think the police are more worried about the huge reduction in accidents, speeding and drink driving which could put a lot of them out of the job). Sure crooks could make their car look like a cop car and put some flashing lights on it, but they could do that now to human drivers. Also i'm not saying it would be impossible to steal an autonomous car but with the kind of electronic security, cameras, and gps data it has, it would make it harder then taking a normal car. The biggest problem is people wont know who to sue if something does go wrong; which is ridiculous because this technology would reduce traffic and accidents (and if less people die what's the problem) while acting as a personal taxi for your family and friends.

Your idea of "cracking the security" seems to be roughly as developed as the plot to "Hackers".

Highwaymen can already jump people, force them off the road somehow to deviate to a location where they can rob the driver. Making something autonomous doesn't magically give thieves supernatural cracking abilities to get at the interfaces that drive the car.

Please look up the meaning of "autonomous". It seems to me that you are misunderstanding the concept of the term. Nowhere in its definition does it require that something which is autonomous get any of its operating instructions remotely. In fact, "autonomous" implies exactly the opposite.

No, I'm not misunderstanding the concept. Where exactly do you think those maps come from? That the car just magically has all of them for the entire world, magically updated? Or perhaps congestion data?

The point is that if you think we're anywhere near the point where these things aren't going to have to connect to the net to get information you're sorely mistaken. Autonomous only implies one thing, no driver necessary. It does not imply that it's never going to touch the internet, in fact, it implies the

Okay... so it has to download a map from a server somewhere. That's a pretty far cry from being able to direct it to whereever you want to go. And considering immediate conditions will always take priority over any map data anyways (to account for objects on the road which a map will not show, such as other cars, pedestrians, etc), I'm not entirely sure how a person who even gets cars to download fake maps is going to be able to reliably direct them to an arbitrary location.

99% of the drivers with satnav at the moment don't bother learning their route, they just follow the instructions that the voice gives them.

My point: human drivers are vulnerable to the same attack vector. I don't expect the research has been done, but I'd bet $1 that if you managed to crack the satnav traffic alert system and fed in data that directed traffic to your dark alleyway, at least 50% of satnav drivers would follow those directions instead of their own idea of the route.

Like I said in my other post, where precisely do these cars get their maps from? If they deal with congestion and road closures, that data has to come from somewhere. I remember seeing an episode of Monk where somebody screwed with the GPS navigation system to take the car off course.

It's fantasy stuff to believe that an autonomous car is going to be operating without maps any time soon and as long as the cars are dependent upon maps to know how to get where they're going, they're going to be susceptible to

The cars are pretty smart and can remap on the fly if they run into a problem (just like a human would) and they do create their own maps (i can't be bothered to look up the videos, but we have robots that can map the inside of mines without any guidance, and the car Stanley that won the darpa urban grand challenge could even drive up over the curb to miss a road obstruction as well as dealing with a completely foreign environment). The Google cars however usually just add detail to the already extensive kn

Except that OnStar is designed to be remotely accessible. The car is in contact with OnStar HQ. If you get into an accident, they know it, and can alert the police. They can locate and disable the vehicles. They can remotely analyze problems. They can unlock the doors for you if you lock the keys in it. There is no way that they could not add features to control an autonomous vehicle. There's your access point for the bad guys.

Or texting, eating, adjusting the stereo, putting on make-up, or all the other stuff we do instead of watching the road. I ride a motorcycle, and people ask me if I think it's dangerous. I reply that at least I'm alert, watching the road, and have both hands on the handlebars with nary a phone or other distraction in sight. Autonomous vehicles don't have to be perfect to win me over, just better than the average driver, which is a terribly low bar to cross.

But for general use I think it'll happen gradually.There are already publicly available systems that will apply the brakes for you if you are going to collide with the vehicle in front. And systems that will stop you from veering out of lane on a highways. There are even cars already out there that will perform parallel parking for you.

Aircraft autopilots didn't start doing landings from day one. They evolved from much simpler systems. Each step proving itself for a long time.

Seriously, why wouldn't Police be allowed to pull over autonomous vehicles? Unless they are completely without flaw there's always going to be a few corner cases where there would be a legitimate need. Plus sometimes the police need to pull over a vehicle because a warrant has been issued for the owner of the car, but not directly related to the driving.

And what would be the point of pulling it over? Give it a stern reprimand before sending back on its way?

Unless the cop plans to either (1) Inspect it for malfunction/damage, or (2) Impound it, I don't see any reason to physically stop the vehicle. A properly tagged vehicle should provide all you need to issue a citation; no curb required.

Suppose a vehicle hits a pedestrian or cyclist, and drags [seattlepi.com] the corpse. A witnessing cop can either (1) pull the vehicle over, or (2) follow the vehicle at a polite distance while all identifying features of the victim are shed to the ground. I think pulling the vehicle over is the appropriate course of action here. If nothing else, to prevent the trauma to hundreds of witnesses.

If a vehicle is being operated recklessly, it should get pulled over. If there are outstanding tickets / warrants for its owner, it should be searched / impounded. I don't see why the presence of a driver should matter here.

There certainly may be a diminished need for traffic enforcement leading to fewer police cars on the road, but having cars completely ignore police and just driving on is going to cause problems in emergencies. The police do need to pull over supect passengers and vehicles for contraband such as drugs, child porn, illegal guns, etc. There are also observed crimes such as someone in the car waving a gun around in the car on the road. Then you do have the malfunction and damaged vehicles such as with the e

You are assuming that all a cop wants to do is issue a citation. Here are some more plausible possibilities, just off the top of my head:

1) There's an emergency up ahead, and police need to stop all the vehicles headed in that direction to prevent the emergency from escalating.
2) The vehicle is driverless, but not necessarily riderless -- i.e., the police need to rescue a kidnapping victim, or apprehend a wanted felon/terrorist (hey, it's the current buzzword), or search for narcotics, or...
3) You gave other reasons yourself (namely, inspecting it for malfunction/damage or impounding it). In those cases, a citation may not be necessary, but it might be necessary to remove it from the road because it presents a hazard to others.
4) What if it's not properly tagged?

Keep in mind, if the vehicle is autonomous, it probably won't be speeding, it probably won't run red lights or stop signs, it probably won't be driving recklessly (unless it has faulty sensors). Unlike with human-piloted automobiles, I think issuing citations for anything other than expired tags would be rather unlikely.

This raises a good point... autonomous vehicles need to be programmed to safely pull off to the side of the road when an emergency vehicle has its lights flashing and siren on. It then has to wait there until it is safe to rejoin traffic. Do the current ones do that?

Good news is, since the vehicle is computer based, to pull the vehicle over the police would most likely have to issue a computer command, which could be logged, including date, time and identity of the police officer who issue the other. If it is related to a warrant, it could even be linked to court data.

Sure. But it's still an interesting question. It's illegal for a driver to speed or jump a red light or whatever, but if an automated car with 4 people in it does one of those things, who, if anyone, has broken the law?

The designer of the car broke the law, the vehicle is defective breaking traffic laws and needs to be impounded and the builder fined for endangering the public.

When a computer is a box sitting on someone's desk that computes figures and shows lights on a display there is no reason to restrict who can do what with machines and they should be open to hacking and modification. When they are connected to networks the burden goes up a bit and maybe code has to be signed or restricted to a safe API on top of a

"Are the signs correct? Are they transiently obscured by a parked vehicle or a pedestrian?"

Same problems humans face, too bad.

"Computers, even with perfect design and implementation, are still able to do the wrong thing. Garbage in, garbage out."

Same for the humans, yet fines stand for them. I disagree with your premise. I believe that if a vehicle cannot do all the things a human is required to do, it cannot be an autonomous vehicle. It's just remote-controlled.

but you are wrong. A person can argue. A computer can't. Will you let the computer's logs be used in court? Here's a video of the missing sign, so the previous sign, showing 55 mph was still legally in effect. I've done the same to get out of a parking ticket when someone damaged the sign and it was missing. But the implication is that the car should have figured it out even if a human couldn't have?

Same for the humans, yet fines stand for them.

But they aren't. If there's a construction zone and someone puts the speed limit signs up wrong, you a

The question goes to the heart of the argument. If the average driver has a 1.5% chance of causing a collision, but an automated on 1% then clearly the automated vehicle is preferable (to over simplify somewhat). However if the 'designers' at GM are responsible for 20 million cars then they have no incentive to ever try and work, because merely by law of averages they're going to get screwed selling millions of cars a year.

A couple of months ago the brakes failed on my car and I narrowly avoided hitting two people. Now the thing is, my car had been at the shop to get the brakes checked and repaired about 3 weeks before that. Who is really at fault? In 3 weeks the auto shop can't really be liable for anything that happened to the brakes, but I had no indication there was a problem until I had a loud thunking sound, and no braking action (go go emergency brakes). Had I been a fraction of a second slower realizing what just happened, well, the law would have held me liable for hitting two people. Even though I would attempt to argue that I did due diligence on the brakes, and was braking from a safe distance (but when you're going 60 Km/h and your brakes fail it takes a moment to process what happened and what your solutions are,and what your fall back scenarios are going to be if the emergency brake doesn't work, and even then you're guessing just how quickly the emergency brake will stop you).

In your case, you're saying what we all know. All data is dirty, and no one thing is 100% tolerant of all possible input cases from the dirty data (in addition to all other failures that can happen on a device). Our legal systems don't really play nice with the real world statistical probabilities of random failures, or how you ascribe blame to something that isn't intentional. It would be most unfortunate if a data entry clerk from 20 years ago is held liable because they typed a speed limit into a database as 80kph rather than the intended 60.

I suppose in some ways it is similar to a national healthcare and medical malpractice problem. People die, all of us. Just as mechanical devices will eventually fail. If you individually mandate responsibility to service providers (drivers, mechanics, doctors) you end up with a much different system than if you collectivize the risk (think NHS in the UK). If the goal is a system that in general reduces accidents you need to move away from trying to assign blame on a case by case basis, and providers who consistently make mistakes can be dealt with internally- but you'll have to accept some sort of shared insurance system for the fact that accidents will happen. Whether that's manufacturers or operators who pay into it (or the government or points of sale or....) I don't know.

The vaccine example in the summary suggests the designer can be exempt from all liability - even for genuine defects introduced by them, no matter how or why. I dislike blanket immunity. When there is an arguable case for genuinely defective design AND it would be reasonable for the manufacturer to know this (not all defects are knowable/identifiable in advance, but that doesn't mean all are) then there should be no automatic immunity.

It may require a special court of experts to properly determine if it was

Yes, of course it will, because it needs to get right anyway (to allow the cop to pass), if getting right puts it on the shoulder, it should stop.

NO. Not always. Sometimes moving left is the necessary action, to facilitate the center of the roadway being open to emergency vehicles. Just around the corner from me is a major 6 lane (3 each way except at intersections when it becomes 8.5 including turn and merge lanes). Just around the other corner is a major hospital. Across the street is a fire house."Alwa

Of course police can pull over an "autonomous" car, for a myriad of perfectly valid reasons both related to traffic safety and not.

And if the driver is asleep, and the car fails to stop on its own, someone gets a "fleeing and evading" citation/arrest/jail sentence like they would in any other road-going vehicle that fails to stop.

I don't understand why "can police stop an autonomous car" is even a fucking question. Seriously.

Of course police will be able to pull over autonomous vehicles. They have to be able to. Vehicles must yield the right of way to emergency vehicles displaying the appropriate lights. As in, it's a fucking ambulance, pull over and stop moron.

And what should the police do if a defective vehicle is creating a hazard to others? Let it go because it's autonomous? Like the Washington state police couldn't PIT a woman going the wrong way down the interstate for 60 miles, someti

They're automomous, at some point they're likely to be operating on their own.

But, either way, I'm sure at some point one of these things is going to arrive somewhere driving half way with a dead body because the driver died and there were no sensors to tell the car about the death.

I'm guessing that when cars get to the point where they can basically go on autopilot for portions of the trip that they'll also have some sort of software to tell them to pull over when law enforcement says to.

Does the Google vehicle travel by default in the left lane or the right lane? On a many lane road, ambulances will use whatever lane is clear, so pulling over may not be an issue. This behavior includes roads with only one lane both ways (welcome to Pennsylvania, where double yellow does not mean no-passing; sadly, I find myself increasingly supporting this, as the insanity of our roads seems to promote a 'liberal' interpretation of traffic laws). I swear our traffic engineers are the kids who flunked out o

There will be an immediate and HUGE problem of folks modding their cars to allow manual override.
That should be fun.

Actually, they'll probably all have the option to manually drive them straight out of the box. Think rural environments, dirt roads, navigating your way around a shipping container facility where no map in the world can be up to date enough to help the autonomous car. Also, no one will trust the first models enough to accept a car without the option.

Some government, maybe even China, could embrace Autonomous Vehicles and press the technology forward (as an Authoritarian regime can) and find it improves public safety immensely (China has a high mortality rate on a high accident rate), further revealing other great benefits to their society - while people continue to wrestle with it in the US, over concerns as stated above.

When I traveled around Europe on trains I was thrilled how carefree I could be about intercity travel and how fast and comfortable TGV/ICE can be. Then return to the US and arrive at the decision it is a backward country for dismantling most of its once far-reaching rail network in favor of a car (or two) for every adult - but that's how you get around, which means long trips are a major drag - you have to focus on the most tedius of activities for hours at a time - driving. Ugh. Autonomous Vehicles could alleviate some of this tedium.

I can see why in the US there is such resistance to autonomous vehicles: Small towns and counties depend on driver error, be it speeding, red light cameras, or stuff like that for revenue. An autonomous system means that everyone will be going the speed limit, so no tickets (and no chance at finding marijuana and thus earning a civil forfeiture prize) will be given.

This is sad because the US is the perfect place for autonomous vehicles -- most cities are too sprawled out for even buses to be reliable, much less light rail. So, vehicles that drive themselves would be ideal because it would allow long distances to be covered with vehicles packed in as much as their computer and mechanical systems would allow, compared to current driving conditions which depend on the driver's ability/reactions (or lack of when compared to a computer.) Even for people who don't own a car, it wouldn't be hard to have a Car2Go/Zipcar like service.

Even more ironic, with computer controlled cars, it would lesson the need for more and more highway improvements. Cars can be sped up or slowed down to allow vehicles in and out, they can be moved into lanes depending on their destination, and if there is a vehicle problem, it can be moved to the side of the road and traffic routed around it without putting the highway out of commission for hours on end. This would save a municipal area far more money than they ever would earn by speeding tickets.

I keep thinking this situation is exactly the same as the HDTV transition. It's inevitable, so the government just gives a deadline, hands out some coupons for free upgrades to your old technology, and then on Jan 1 2018 we're all on autodrive. If 100% of the cars on the road are robodrive, it takes a lot of the complexities out of it.

Except that will never happen. The important difference is that automakers don't want autodrive cars. It would mean dramatically fewer cars sold because individuals wouldn't

Yes the same china where a small kid was run over and Many people in China are hesitant to help people who appear to be in distress for fear that they will be blamed. High-profile law suits have ended with good Samaritans ordered to pay hefty fines to individuals they sought to help.

Even if it is adopted in a place like China, don't expect it to make a difference in the US. As you've already pointed out, intercity travel is fast and comfortable in Europe using trains, but Americans are blissfully unaware of anything that occurs outside of the states.

Then return to the US and arrive at the decision it is a backward country for dismantling most of its once far-reaching rail network in favor of a car (or two) for every adult

The US hasn't dismantled its rail system--it still has the biggest rail system in the world, bigger than the entire EU taken together (in terms of miles). However, the US railway system is mainly used for freight, while people mostly drive.

When I traveled around Europe on trains I was thrilled how carefree I could be about intercity travel and how fast and comfortable TGV/ICE can be

It's fast and comfortable, but it's also a boondoggle and heavily subsidized. It's also not particularly environmently friendly, since it displaces a lot of freight traffic to the roads and often has to operate far below capacity. And even with all those wonderful trains, say, Germans still own as many cars per capita as Americans.

When I traveled around Europe on trains I was thrilled how carefree I could be about intercity travel and how fast and comfortable TGV/ICE can be. Then return to the US and arrive at the decision it is a backward country for dismantling most of its once far-reaching rail network in favor of a car (or two) for every adult - but that's how you get around, which means long trips are a major drag - you have to focus on the most tedius of activities for hours at a time - driving. Ugh. Autonomous Vehicles could alleviate some of this tedium.

I have several observations to make here. First, there are a lot of people who admire European trains, but have no idea how those are paid for. Sure, it'd be nice to have a US train paid for by European taxpayers, like how European trains are funded, but it's a wee bit unrealistic. So then the US would be stuck paying for US trains with hapless US taxpayers. That changes the US-oriented cost/benefit for such projects.

Second, I find it terribly reprehensible to treat infrastructure projects like just another fad. I don't care that you think the US looks backwards for having such an advanced car-based transportation system. It should be, "Does this infrastructure project justify a reasonable estimate of its costs and benefits?" Not, "Uzbekistan has high speed rail so we should too."

Finally, rail projects even in those European countries are notorious for being poor return on investment. And current US projects are laughably bad even by such standards.

For example, it is routine for big high speed rail projects in the US to ignore maintenance and operations costs while grossly inflating ridership estimates. The same politicians who allocate large amounts of funds for construction won't provide for the costs of running that rail, effectively creating huge, long term money sinks for the state and local governments who end up running the system. That's the primary reason that Wisconsin and Florida backed out of high speed rail projects.

Another example, which no doubt will become epic in its extent of failure, is the California High-Speed Rail project. They got a bunch of bond money in the last election cycle and subsequently greatly increased the cost estimate for completion of the rail ($36 billion in 2009 dollars to $65 billion in 2010 dollars). That's a "bait-and-switch" and they have yet to break ground. It also builds poorly used segments first so that the money is spent in a grotesquely inefficient way.

At least, autonomous driving uses the primary strength of the US, it's well-developed road infrastructure and it plays well with what's already there. High speed rail is just a slow though comfortable plane. A lot of its advantage could be eliminated simply by putting in efficient security at airports.

That are 100% human controlled in the USA. but the first death at the hands of autonomous vehicles will be all over CNN the first time it happens. There will be congressional investigations, Department of Transportation studies, and on and on - yet, ideally they theoretically take the worst part of driving out of the equation - the driver.

People moving is just the start for autonomous vehicles. The real revolution will be in moving goods with little micro-movers.

Run out of milk? no problem, just order some on your fridge and it's at the front door in minutes. Want a hot dinner? Log into your local restraunt and order one to go.

Taxi services will be cheap, affortable, and accessable. Noone need own a car anymore. No need for a garrage or driveway infront of your house. No need for traffic lights, aproaching cars will just 'book' a timeslot through the intersection, narrowly avoiding collisions with safety, speeding the journey to and fro and saving energy as you don't need to brake and accelerate anymore.

Autonomous mobility is going to be truly revolutionary in the way we live.

yeah! when I was a kid I had a book from 1970 or so, describing how the year 2000 will be like. I don't remember most of it, but certainly people living in underwater cities of 70's design. you know, kinda like the the world we live in today, yes?

oh, and it had those robocars, too. I still remember the pic of a family playing cards while "being driven" along the highway. I also recall huge, efficient farms... but what I don't recall is the book going a whole lot into politics, the gap between rich and poor,

Eh, I'm not that excited about autonomous automobiles. I envision something more like Wall-e where people have so much automation that they become slobs. To some degree it already happened to the U.S. just from car culture. You no longer walk more than even a quarter mile a day. Your car sits just a few steps away in your home garage. The parking space is right next to the front door of the store or the office. Now all of your medical ailments are due to being in a chair for most of the day rather than using your body for what it was made for: to move yourself.

I'm not sure why we need this when we've had the solution for quite a while. One trip to Tokyo will make you realize what we've ignored for perhaps the last 100 years in America. Tokyo itself is designed like real-life Disneyland. If you go to Disneyland and walk around in the park, you'll notice that it isn't so bad. Why? Because the inside of the park was designed for people, not cars. Tokyo is exactly like this. The center of the city was designed for people without cars. Trains and subways take you everywhere and come regularly. Thirsty? There's a vending machine 5 feet away, a convenience store 50 feet away. The closest train/subway station? A 5 minute walk. Pedestrian bridges over particularly busy streets. Buildings have no parking because nobody uses cars.

What everyone thinks of Japan (besides the anime junk) is that it is a small tiny and crappy apartment with no living space. That's true, but it is only half of the story. Nobody takes a camera and shows you how long it takes to get to the closest convenience store, the closest market, the closest restaurant, or the closest train station. But it is all possible, with your two feet and public transit. Using a car in many ways is actually more inconvenient. As bad as the weather got, I didn't mind walking. In fact walking was more interesting. I could observe my surroundings. When I was driving, I was looking to protect myself. Sure, an autonomous car would change that, but there's more to this.

When you get on (a not so busy) train there, you're free to read/sleep/play around on your phone. They already have the conveniences we dream of with autonomous cars simply because their city was built around people and transit.

The strange thing is as busy as their city is, the actual living spaces away from the center of the chaos is quiet (as in no sound). Anywhere in the U.S. which is populated will have this incessant freeway/highway hum. It's annoying. Over there at worst you live next to a train station. The train itself isn't annoying, because they're all electrified and they don't blow their horns. Instead it's the stupid announcement message that the next train will be arriving soon...

As soon as you step outside of the hotel or apartment you feel alive. You see people walking around. You can see people from the street and look into shops and see other people. That doesn't work in United Suburbia of America. Drive by the strip mall and you can barely glance inside. Get out of your car and now you're in "car defense" mode. Walk to another store on the other side of the strip mall and get tired because the parking lot is just too damn big. That's ridiculous.

Since few people own a car, you wonder how they manage to buy large objects or transport things. The simple answer is they rent a car. Most people are called "paper drivers" because they get driving licenses but don't use them regularly. They just use it when convenient. Alternatively you can also have things delivered. Since people don't own their own cars, it is actually possible to work as a delivery man. You know...kinda how we solved distributing milk without refrigeration way back... (As a side note, I'm always confused why only Pizza is delivered in the U.S. but not other fast foods.)

Every time I come back to the U.S. I'm annoyed. I know our cities don't have to be this way. We don't need novel solutions like autonomous cars to satisfy the living needs of 80% of the urban population. We

it wouldn't be criminal liability if the car owner was operating autonomously in good faith, just liability.

I'd imagine a big-pocket company such as Google could offer blanket indemnity for all purchasers if it was sure that its product was very safe, i.e. it didn't think the autonomous cars would run over people very often. Same for traffic violations, they could offer to pay for any tickets if they were sure their systems were that good.

It is likely that automation will produce vehicles that will perform better than human-driven cars, trucks, and buses. That would certainly result in fewer accidents, reduced congestion, and MUCH lower costs. In there lies the rub. Since the major cost component of commercial transportation is 'the driver', automation would put tens of millions of people out of work just in the United States. For example, with a fleet of smaller, electric vehicle, the entire bus system of a city could be replaced. Rides would cost on par with bus tickets, and service would be 'on demand' like taxi service without the tips. Many people would choose not to own a car if a 'chauffeur driven' vehicle were readily available 'for hire'. Commuting would be transformed, and rush hour traffic would become manageable, reducing construction for road expansion. Car sales would plummet, as would gasoline sales and body shop service. Cars and trucks could run coast to coast with only fuel stops; so could trains, reducing motel and restaurant revenues. These are just a few examples of the seachange.

Every taxi, limo, bus, and truck driver will band together to stop this. Auto manufacturers, construction firms, and oil companies, fearing a drop in revenues, will join them. Lobbyist will fill every waiting room in Congress to ram 'drivers' rights' legislation. Their effort will make the RIAA look like kids watching Sesame Street.

The most important problem from my point of view is that the traffic laws don't always actually make sense. Near my house, there's a T junction about 20 meters from a red light. At the intersection, there's a stop line. They used to have a "do not block intersection" sign back at the T junction so that traffic could still turn down the side street. They've replaced it with a "stop here on red" sign. The intent seems to be to create two stop lines for the same red light. The actual law is largely ambiguous on this. It definitely doesn't address this particular situation, but it doesn't say that the town, _can't_ do it. Most people just completely ignore the sign. I just do what I always did before and I don't block the intersection when there's a red light. No-one seems to be able to tell if they're actually required to stop there and, if they do stop, if they have to stop like they'd stop at a red light, or it they have to stop like they'd stop at a stop sign, also, since the turn there is a right turn, and a right turn on red is allowed at a stop light in my state, is a right turn on red allowed there since it's not actually at the light?

So, the problem is the law. It's not logically and consistently written like computer code, it's always open to interpretation. There are many situations where you legitimately can't tell you've broken the law until you've gone before a judge and they've decided. And then, there are many situations while driving where you either have to technically break the law or stop traffic for hours. Consider a left turn at a light where there isn't a separate left turn signal. If the traffic coming in the other direction is continuous, they have the right of way and you can't turn left unless you move to the middle of the intersection, wait for the light to change, then turn. This is illegal. It's what everyone does in that situation and, 9 times out of 10, a police officer watching you do this won't even care. But, consider the situation from a legal point of view. If it's a turning lane, you can't legally change lanes at the intersection to go straight. You can't legally turn left until there's an opening in traffic, which could literally be hours in some places and times, but you can't legally just sit there either, because that's blocking traffic. Aside from that one, there's the fact that you're legally required to stay in a lane unless you're changing lanes, but I've been on a lot of multi-lane roads where the lanes haven't been marked, either because they were faded completely, or because they'd been removed for repainting (months before the repainting in some cases). Legally speaking, all the cars should be grouping into one lane in the dead center of the twenty meter wide stretch of road. That's insane. What everyone actually does is illegally estimate where the lanes should be and travel in them side by side. Then there's yellow and red lights. There are intersections where you cannot avoid running a red light. For starters, you don't know how long the green light and yellow light will last before the red. The guidelines for most states for the length of the lights don't even seem to take the speed limit and the width of the intersection into account and the guidelines often aren't followed anyway. Which means that there are many intersections where, even if the light changes to yellow _after_ you've crossed the stop line, you can't make it all the way across before the red light unless you're speeding. Also, where the intersection actually ends and you're no longer bound by the light is poorly defined both in law and in physical reality. Most people consider themselves clear when they can no longer see the light, but obviously that's at a different point depending on where the light is mounted. Stop lines are another issue. You have to stop at the stop line, but the stop line isn't always in the right place for you to actually see if there are cars coming. Often, you have to stop at the stop line, then move forward (sometimes quite a large distance), then stop again or do a ro

Your examples are cases where you don't understand the law - not where it is inconsistent. Let me explain:

Consider a left turn at a light where there isn't a separate left turn signal. If the traffic coming in the other direction is continuous, they have the right of way and you can't turn left unless you move to the middle of the intersection, wait for the light to change, then turn. This is illegal

No it is not. This is actually the correct thing to do, and my driving instructor practiced it with me several times.

Which means that there are many intersections where, even if the light changes to yellow _after_ you've crossed the stop line, you can't make it all the way across before the red light unless you're speeding.

It is legal to enter the intersection on the green/yellow and then exit after the red has changed. The law states that all other drivers must yield to the vehicle in the intersection. So you have the right of way, even after the light turns red. To make this clearer: Suppose you pull

> Simple questions, like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous vehicles, have yet to be answered

Police is driving autonomous vehicles that autonomously stop autonomous vehicles that catch the autonomous eye when local autonomous government needs to replenish its autonomous budget. We just have to watch those events unraveling with detached gaze from the passenger seat in the vehicle of life

.. everything looks like a nail.
Perhaps it's time to not evaluate based on results and feedback within a political term. Expecting this unfortunately seems like a pipe dream.
http://www.et3.com/ [et3.com] - Evacuated tube transport

The legal problems are solveable. We already have a whole insurance system in place to deal with auto accident liability. The only question is how much auto insurance will cost for driverless vehicles. Once there's some experience with them, insurance rates can be set.

The legal history of air bags is helpful here. When air bags were first developed, there were real worries that they might deploy when not needed and cause accidents. That's why air bag controllers have logging of the last few seconds, and why that data is collected and analyzed. It took a few years and a few thousand crashes to get that tuned properly. Now it's a non-issue.

There are many practical problems to be solved, especially for driving in congested areas. But most of those problems are known, and can be solved one at a time.

Nobody wants to wait. That's the whole point. That's why it is absurd to attempt to formulate a comprehensive system from first principles. We should let this new societal development unfold RIGHT NOW, and construct that comprehensive system along the way.

As an aside, while it took 10 billion years to go from the Big Bang to a newly formed Earth, it only took 4.4998 billion years to go from replicating molecules to the anatomically modern human, and less than 200 thousand years more to get to our modern civ

As is Central Design for automated cars. Why evolution created an eye so we should just sit on our collected asses for 4 million years and I'm sure an automated car shall simply evolve! And I'm sure as it evolves it'll create the *perfect* solution after those 4 million years.

After all, we all know eyes are the very best possible imaging devices every created. Those silly telescopes, nightvision goggles and highspeed cameras have nothing on our vision!

We don't know and it depends on the definition of "best", but it's almost certainly never happened before. Human eyes have glaring flaws -- blind spot, limited colour receptivity, unimpressive resolution compared to some known alternatives, relatively high light requirements, easily damaged, degrades over time, inconsistent with many humans having very poor vision even at their peak, easily damaged by the giant space explosion that is continuously running in the sky for ~half of the average day, slow to adjust to dimmer lighting conditions, limited range of motion and extremely limited independent range of motion. Some other animals correct those flaws but have other flaws all of their own. Evolution actually does a very poor job of finding globally optimal solutions, but it does a reasonable job at identifying local maxima / minima of sufficient signifiance, and hanging around in the area of same maxima / minima.

Our super computers and dedicated scientists can't even predict the weather terribly accurately; what makes you think any "expert" has the slightest clue how to predict and control social, technological, and economic development?

Unstated assumption: that the weather is consistently less complicated than these other things.

The laws should emerge from reality, not from a committee of bureaucrats.

I'm not quite sure what that means. No law (as in, legal law) has ever "emerged from reality" in any sense that I can understand the phrase.

Oops, forgot to mention: this also places liability squarely in the hands of the operator of the vehicle. As the operator of an autonomous vehicle, you still have to pay enough attention to react in the event of a malfunction. Malfunction due to improper maintenance is on the owner/operator as well.

If someone steps on your foot, that's an accident that you/they can negotiate on. If a corporation designs a toy which steps on children's feet every time they use it, that's a different matter entirely.

The problem here is that liability switches from personal (i.e. you hit their car) to corporate (i.e. our cars killed people). That's a messy area to get into, as evidenced by any health and safety policy or risk assessment you'll ever see. Corporations won't want to take it on without government backing